﻿Wiggle Waggle, the yearly walk to raise money for the Pasadena Humane Society, was this weekend. Take a look at the post below at some of the pictures from the event. Dogs of all shapes and sizes, enjoying a wonderful Sunday morning at The Rose Bowl. My dog Samantha is an alumni. She came into my life shortly after I had put down Chelsea, another alumni. Chelsea had been a model dog, so well trained when I get her, that when I walked her, I actually had people ask me if she had been trained by the Dog Whisperer. Unfortunately, she was half Rottweiler. The half that came with bad hips. After a long painful battle with that and other health problems, I had to say goodbye. One afternoon I was looking at the PHS website and saw a Doberman pincher had been brought into the shelter. I went the next afternoon during my lunch hour and was told that the Dobie had already found a home. “Are you looking for a big dog?” one of the volunteers asked hopefully. “Well, yes I am.” “How about the biggest dog we have?” “Um, well…” “Let me show her to you.” She was the same color as Chelsea and had a sweet face and even friendlier disposition. I was in love. She seemed, at best, in like. When Chelsea first came, she ran through the house and yard, overjoyed to finally have come to a real home. Samantha on the other hand, walked through and looked around as if to say, “Really? I was hoping for something a little bigger, with a pool and a little boy.” ‘Her first night she slept soundly as if she didn’t have a care in the world and snored so loud, I couldn’t sleep myself. Our first walk together, no one was asking if Cesar had a hand in training her. She dragged me down the street like I was water skiing. I came home several nights to find her not in the yard, but down the street, apparently making the rounds to get to know the neighbors. Out of boredom, she chewed up door mats and took the dryer vent cover off the garage. Several times. The hardware store where I kept going for replacements, knew me by name. I stared calling coming home from work, “the walk of shame”, because I would walk Sami around the yard and find everything she had destroyed that day. At the end, she would lay down with her face in her paws, as if to say, “I messed up again.” She looked like Chelsea, but where Chelsea was obedient and aiming to please, Samantha was confident and sometimes downright stubborn. Chelsea was even keeled and Samantha had bursts of high energy and then wanted to just lay down and sleep. I had said that after dealing with the sadness of Chelsea’s declining health, I wanted a dog with some spunk. The D-Man, my significant other, pointed out I had gotten exactly what I asked for. Problem was, her spunk was getting exasperating. Then something strange happened. One night, very late, I heard the sound sleeper up and roaming around the house. It was unusual, since the one thing Samantha was extremely good at was sleeping. She didn’t bark and she didn’t seem to have to go out, so I went back to sleep. Samantha had never shown any interest in dog toys, but I had Chelsea’s in the spare bedroom on a stool. Chelsea had one favorite that she always kept with her. I had put it in the middle of the toy pile, but that morning, out of the clear blue, the toy was sitting in the hallway, right outside my bedroom door. I felt a chill go down my back. Had Samantha had a night time visit from Chelsea? Was Samantha asking for some kind of forgiveness? I picked it up and put it back where it had been. I never saw it out again. What was even stranger was Samantha’s behavior. After that night, there were only a few instances where “the walk of shame” yielded any damage and we eventually stopped doing it. She still got out of the backyard on occasion but she would be on the front porch waiting for me to come home from work. Not a perfect walker by any means, at least your shoulder stays in the socket. So what happened the night I found the toy? There are logical explanations and some not so logical. Like so many things in the lives of our pets, I will never really know. What I do know is I am glad the Doberman went home with someone else and I ended up with spunky Sami, the dog I was looking for all along.﻿

Another fun weekend with L.A. Lyon and the folks that came out at Route 66 Roadhouse and The Blarney Stone. During one of the breaks Friday night, Rene, Eric and I started kicking around some numbers as to how many gigs the three of us have done together. We figured out somewhere in the 400 range. It doesn’t surprise me that sometimes one of us will bring up, “Remember the night we?” and the rest of us have to be reminded of some night that is barely a vague memory. For me, unfortunately, the bad ones are more vivid in my mind, a personality trait I have been trying to change my entire life! The one thing that never fails to trigger something , is the music itself. I saw a quote this week that really resonated with me. “All it takes is one song to bring back a thousand memories.” Certain songs will always remind me of people I have played with and even certain bands I have been in. I will never hear Chi Coltrane’s “Thunder and Lighting” without thinking of the Wisconsin version of L.A. Lyon. Every time I hear a Rush song, I immediately go back in time to my first band Vision. For this band, there are too many to name. Some are a private joke between three people who have spent more than a decade doing music together. Name the song and we would all name the same gig. It might be a fun game to try the next time we are on a road trip! Of course, songs and the memories they evoke are not just for musicians. It happens to everyone who just loves music. The songs that remind of us of the people we love are the most special. When Rickey Martin’s song, “Livin La Vida Loca” came out, we played it numerous times like every other cover band in the world. Yet, whenever I hear it, it is not a gig I remember. It is my father picking me up at the airport at the beginning of a visit to Wisconsin. Driving me home in his Ford Escort station wagon, the song came on the radio. He started singing along and I was more than a little surprised to find he knew every word. After a rather passionate performance, I said, “I guess you like that song, huh Dad?” He turned and looked at me, a little embarrassed. “Oh, was I singing too loud?” It came on my car radio the other morning on my way to work and it wasn’t Rickey Martin’s voice I heard singing out, “She’ll make you take your clothes off and go dancing in the rain!” I went into my office with a little bit of a tear in my eye, but a big smile just the same.

This was the first time in 10 weeks that I had the entire weekend off from L.A. Lyon. If you were expecting a page of projects I completed along with several activities, followed by a few pages of deep insightful thoughts on the meaning of life, you are going to be very disappointed. Truth be told, aside from doing a little housecleaning and putting together a fun, casual dinner with a few friends, I didn’t do anything terribly productive. It was a long stressful week at the corporate job and honestly, I felt spent. So I ate a few too many cupcakes and taco chips and watched the Packers come from behind and beat the Jets. Speaking of the NFL, there was a ton of commentary and social media around what is going on off the football field. So much has already been said, but I will say I found many of the comments and opinions given by men and women, very disturbing. Especially the talk around who "deserved it."

My opinion on who deserved what is pretty simple stupid. We deserve to not be abused by someone we love. We deserve to not abuse ourselves, by constantly telling ourselves we are not where we should be or who we should be. We deserve to be happy. All of us.Tonight, at half time of the night game, I will be taking a moment to have a glass of wine on my back deck. It has been a hot weekend and even though I didn’t accomplish much, I had some laughs and some fun. Monday I will go back to trying to save the world before bedtime. Tonight, I will spend a moment just enjoying my backyard. Because, yes, I deserve it.

﻿In April of 2004, I finally left the hotel and moved back into my home. The garage was completed, with a snazzy new floor, drywall, a sink and a new washer and dryer. The house had a new roof, a new alarm system and a new living room wall and ceiling. Since I had to get a home equity loan to keep up with the fire expenses and also because the house was empty, I had the bedroom floors redone in bamboo and the original hardwood in the dining room and living room refinished. The whole house was repainted inside and out. It looked better than it had in years. Was it worth it? My public adjuster who fought the Evil Empire (my insurance company) had told me all along it would all work out and he was right. Like so many things in life though, having people telling you it will be alright means nothing when you are in the middle of something that seems insurmountable. The great thing though is once you start successfully doing hard things, less and less things seems hard. I always think of the scene in “Forrest Gump” where Forrest and Captain Dan are in their boat in the middle of a hurricane and Captain Dan keeps screaming, “Is that all you got?” I have a bulletin board in my garage of pictures taken just days after the fire happened. I like it out where I can see them so when I am having a cranky day, I can look at them and remember. I take a moment and look around the garage and see what came out of so much stress and heartache. And I remind myself that a lot of the stress and heartache could have been avoided if I just would have believed, instead of focusing on how bad things seemed at the time. Yes, it was worth it, just learning that lesson. Just in case I am coming off all evolved, there is one final footnote to this story that brought me a lot of joy, even though it wasn't very Zen like. I was feeling a little down that first Christmas home. All my beloved Christmas ornaments had been destroyed in the fire and although I had gotten a fair amount as gifts, the tree looked a little bare. The day after Christmas, I opened my LA Times Sunday paper to the Real Estate section, as I did every Sunday morning. There on the front page, was an article detailing an ordeal someone else had gone through dealing with my very own Evil Empire, trying to get their house put together after a fire. The insurance adjuster they were dealing with? The same one I had spent eleven miserable months with. There on the front page, in the holiday season, for all the world to see, was an article, using his name and calling him out for being the same jerk he had been to me.

Labor Day is usually the traditional end of summer, but not in Southern California when we will still have warm days through October. What it does mean is some great deals on outdoor pillows and cushion. Check out how I updated some rattan chairs on my Home Ideas page! I hope everyone had a safe and fun Labor Day weekend!